Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro PRESIDENT TRUMP's

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Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro PRESIDENT TRUMP's PRESIDENT TRUMP’S ATTACKS ON PENNSYLVANIA’S FREE AND FAIR ELECTION AND THE EVENTS OF JANUARY 6 Pennsylvania bore the brunt of President Trump’s crusade to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election. For months, President Trump attacked the integrity of the Commonwealth’s election, repeating lie after lie at every opportunity. In state and federal court, his attorneys laundered his lies as legal claims brought in increasingly frivolous lawsuits. One after another, they failed. The courts resoundingly confirmed what Pennsylvania already knew: The 2020 election in Pennsylvania was free and fair; it was conducted in accordance with the laws of the Commonwealth and the United States; and the results of that election were accurate. Yet despite rejection by the courts, President Trump persisted in his lies. Instead of acknowledging the truth, President Trump inflamed his supporters and insisted on his baseless claims of a rigged election. And what the President and his lawyers failed to accomplish through deceit, the mob he incited on January 6, 2021, tried to accomplish by force. His litigation strategy in shambles, President Trump fixated on disrupting Congress’s counting of Electoral College votes, and his supporters violently attempted to carry out his wishes. President Trump’s lies led directly to the events of January 6. At the rally he had promoted and in front of supporters he had mobilized, President Trump inflamed the crowd by repeating the same debunked allegations about voter fraud in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. In his remarks, he repeated no fewer than eight false statements about Pennsylvania’s elections alone. In addition, he falsely claimed that the election results would be changed if Vice President Pence would simply reject the electors from Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and then he ended by urging his enraged supporters to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to where the Vice President was overseeing the counting of electoral votes at that very moment. For this abuse of power and betrayal of his oath of office, the U.S. House of Representatives rightly approved an article of impeachment for incitement of insurrection. Yet the President continues to insist on his lies. In his answer to the article of impeachment, President Trump denied that the statements he made about the election on January 6 and beforehand were false, because “[i]nsufficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that [these statements] were accurate or not.”1 In his most recent pleading, he dismisses his 1 Trump Answer at 4 (Feb. 2, 2021). Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro Page 2 statements as observations about “election security generally” or “election integrity issues,” and claims that he was simply engaging in an “abstract discussion.”2 Let there be no mistake: the statements President Trump made on January 6 were lies. Many “reasonable jurist[s]”—including some appointed by President Trump—evaluated President Trump’s evidence of election improprieties and rejected his claims. Yet he continued to repeat the same lies, despite overwhelming evidence and multiple legal opinions demonstrating that his claims were all false. Between November 3 and January 6, he tweeted about supposed fraud in Pennsylvania nearly once every day.3 Many of those tweets were euphemistically labeled by Twitter as “disputed”; in reality, they were lies. Even now, President Trump persists in his refusal to acknowledge that the 2020 election was free and fair and that his claims that day were false. Yet he is contradicted by the facts and even by his own lead counsel, who acknowledged yesterday in the well of the Senate that President Biden had lawfully won the 2020 election. President Trump is, of course, free to continue to argue the truth of his statements. But the facts make clear that his statements were lies; they were part and parcel of his months-long campaign to discredit the election results; and the events of January 6 were the tragic yet predictable outcome of his campaign of lies. For these actions, he should be convicted and barred from holding future federal office. * * * The 2020 election in Pennsylvania was free, fair, and conducted in accordance with the Commonwealth’s laws. Under remarkably difficult circumstances, bipartisan election officials in Pennsylvania held the Commonwealth’s first-ever general election in which voters were given the option of no-excuse mail-in voting. As a result, more than 2.5 million Pennsylvanians voted by mail, while more than four million voted in person on November 3.4 In total, nearly seven million Pennsylvanians voted in 2020, exceeding 2016 turnout by nearly one million voters. When all the ballots were counted, President Biden won Pennsylvania by approximately 80,000 votes, and Pennsylvania’s 20 electors duly cast their votes for President Biden and Vice President Harris on December 14, 2020.5 Despite these facts, President Trump waged a two-month campaign of attacks on Pennsylvania’s election, all part of his effort to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential race. His lawyers filed multiple cases in Pennsylvania and made numerous unfounded allegations. Those efforts escalated in the days following November 3, as it became apparent that he was likely going to lose Pennsylvania. In court, President Trump’s false claims were resoundingly rejected. President Trump and his allies lost every case they filed in Pennsylvania, with the exception of a minor lawsuit dealing with a handful of votes that were never counted. And it is false, as some have claimed, that these cases were all rejected on the basis of standing or similar grounds. Some cases were 2 Trump Brief at 45, 52 & 61 (Feb. 8, 2021). 3 See https://www.thetrumparchive.com/. 4 See https://www.dos.pa.gov/VotingElections/BEST/Pages/BEST-Election-Stats.aspx. 5 See https://www.electionreturns.pa.gov/#. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro Page 3 easily disposed of on procedural grounds, but in others, the Trump Campaign was given the opportunity to prove its case. At every opportunity, it utterly failed to do so. Most notably, the Trump Campaign filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging a broad- ranging conspiracy among state and local officials across Pennsylvania to steal the election for President Biden. After conducting a hearing at which Rudy Giuliani personally argued for the Trump Campaign, district judge Matthew Brann—previously a Republican party official— resoundingly rejected the claims. He described the lawsuit as “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.”6 His decision was unanimously affirmed by the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in a decision written by Trump appointee Stephanos Bibas. Judge Bibas wrote, “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”7 Having failed to bring a plausible claim of fraud in the federal courts of Pennsylvania, President Trump latched on to an even more frivolous lawsuit, filed by Texas in the U.S. Supreme Court against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan. That suit repeated many of the false claims that had already been rejected by courts in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, while adding a laughable statistical analysis purporting to show that President Biden could not have plausibly won Pennsylvania. The Supreme Court denied Texas’s request to file the complaint, based on the conclusion that Texas lacked standing to challenge another state’s election procedures. Perhaps more notably, the two Justices who would have allowed Texas to file the complaint—because they believe that the Court lacks the discretion to deny such requests—specifically noted that they would not have granted any other relief.8 Despite these failures, President Trump persisted in lying about the election. He continued to tell his supporters that the election had been stolen from him, that the results were fraudulent, and that Pennsylvania and other states had broken their own laws. His ongoing campaign of lies culminated in his speech at the “Save America” rally on January 6. In that speech, he repeated the same lies he had been making since November 3, which were resoundingly rejected by state and federal judges across Pennsylvania—or that were so patently false his lawyers were not even willing to allege them in court. For instance: • President Trump falsely claimed that “the Democrat Secretary of State and the Democrat State Supreme Court justices illegally abolished the signature verification requirements just 11 days prior to the election.”9 6 Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. Boockvar, No. 4:20-CV-02078, 2020 WL 6821992, at *1 (M.D. Pa. Nov. 21, 2020), aff’d sub nom. Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. Sec’y of Pennsylvania, 830 F. App’x 377 (3d Cir. 2020). 7 Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 830 Fed. App’x 377, 381 (3d Cir. 2020). 8 Texas v. Pennsylvania, 2020 WL 7296814, at *1 (U.S. Dec. 11, 2020). 9 January 6, 2021, Tr. at 35:13, https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump- speech-save-america-rally-transcript-january-6. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro Page 4 • He falsely claimed that there were “205,000 more ballots than you had voters” in Pennsylvania.10 • He falsely claimed that “thousands” of dead people voted in Pennsylvania.11
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